PortDesk

The context

An importer buys from eight thousand kilometers away and pays three months before it sells. Between the order and the warehouse there's a container, a document file that has to be complete before the ship arrives, and a customs entry that stalls if a certificate of origin is missing. And when it finally lands, the question nobody can answer fast is the only one that matters: what each unit actually cost with the freight, the insurance and the duties inside it.

What the system does

• The dashboard is about shipments and not orders: where each container is, what ETA it has and what it's missing. An order issued two months ago says nothing; a container five days out of port does
• The document file shows what's missing, not what's there. Invoice, packing list, bill of lading, certificate of origin: the one that's missing is the one that stalls the clearance
• Landed cost spreads freight, insurance, duties and fees across the units, by weight or by value depending on which applies. Until that's worked out, the purchase price isn't the cost, and selling off the purchase price is selling at a loss without knowing it
• The ETA gets updated and the system keeps both, so you can see which supplier and which carrier deliver. Writing over the old date erases the only measurement there is
• A shipment that arrived with fewer units than were invoiced opens the difference as a claim against the supplier, and that difference doesn't go into stock as if it had arrived
• The exchange rate is pinned to each payment's and not to the day's, because an import is paid at three separate moments and the cost is the sum of the three
• And available stock subtracts what's already sold but hasn't shipped yet. Selling the same thing twice is the most expensive mistake an importer makes, and it's a screen mistake